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Saturday, 29 September 2012

Singapore: the hyphen connecting the world and Asia

Singapore must continue to be diplomatically neutral and economically opportunistic to thrive

By PARAG KHANNA For the straits times

WITH the convening of the recent Singapore Summit, the "Little Red Dot" has proven its outsized role and importance on the world stage.

As one participant remarked, never has such a large market capitalisation been assembled in one room. I participated in the full summit, and came away with the view that Singapore's unique position and potential contributions to the world in the decade ahead were capably demonstrated.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong delivered the kind of confidently tech-savvy speech unimaginable from any other head of state, even the BlackBerry-wielding United States leader Barack Obama. He didn't just name drop robotics companies, the online learning portal Coursera and our increasingly social relationships with digital avatars, but used these to highlight the "ruthless competition" Singapore's workers will face as technologies accelerate, rise up the value chain and displace even white-collar labour.

As World Trade Organisation (WTO) director-general Pascal Lamy pointed out, the "gravity of proximity" is weakening in both goods and services. Asia will have to defend its gains, while innovating more to maintain growth.

The theme of "Global-Asia", then, has to be viewed not only as a two-way street, but also as a brave and uncertain new world order to which Singapore must rapidly adapt.

Asia has benefited from the most recent wave of globalisation as a destination for investment capital and raw material, with finished goods exported in the reverse direction.

In globalisation's next phase, Asia's trillions of dollars in savings and sovereign wealth will increasingly reshape global financial flows. Strategic commercial alliances will be sought and currencies diversified away from low-yield Western treasuries towards high-growth debt and equity opportunities in fellow emerging and frontier economies, from Latin America to Africa and the Middle East.

America's edge in 3-D manufacturing and the rise of many high-tech, export-oriented jobs in the US, combined with the exploitation of shale gas and the strengthening of a Western hemispheric alliance, mean that the West potentially has a resurgent future - one that those focused purely on the current situation with America's twin deficits and the moribund euro zone all too eagerly neglect.

Seen in this light, Singapore has to continue to be diplomatically neutral and economically opportunistic.

It must position itself ever more as the filter into Asia for global investment - particularly as interest in hedging China grows through greater exposure to South-east Asia - and the conduit for outbound Asian capital seeking international partnerships.

Singapore, then, is the hyphen in the Global-Asia formula.

Recent years have witnessed how cleverly Singapore has drafted off Switzerland - the only country ranked higher in this year's World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report rankings - luring private banking, commodities trading, hedge funds and other industries to Asia.

It has even become home to the largest overseas presence of Switzerland's leading university ETH Zurich, whose Future Cities Laboratory employs more than 100 researchers to apply advanced data analytics to Singapore's natural environment and social ecosystem, mapping everything from noise pollution to parking patterns.

Furthermore, as Hong Kong loses its lustre as an independent entrepot, Singapore provides the ideal setting for diplomats, investors and thought leaders to convene in a city-state that is increasingly viewed as a role model of good governance and future-ready urbanisation.

Because Asia is neither coherent nor united, the region needs a venue for strategic dialogue that is both inclusive and oriented towards building a stable regional order. Singapore has played this role for more than a decade in the defence arena, as host of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Shangri-La Dialogue, and is now host to a growing presence of multilateral organisations such as the World Bank.

Such trends, as well as the Singapore Summit itself, represent Singapore's more confident shift into a new role as the unofficial capital of Asia.

As the global economy cools while tensions heat up in maritime Asia, Singapore cannot afford to be complacent. The elegant Indian executive Anand Mahindra reminded the audience that no government in the world appears to have as much freedom to manoeuvre imaginatively as Singapore's, investing in the kinds of innovations that will define the future, from zero-emissions districts to undersea settlements.

According to The Economist, Singapore now ranks behind only New York and London in its dynamism and liveability.

And yet, Singapore must be more than a smart city-state: It must become the world's foremost info­state, a polity that provides world-class security coupled with world-class connectedness.

This must apply not just to the financial sector and elites, but the entire population that deserves the opportunity to acquire relevant technological skills and convert them into entrepreneurial activity. Only then will Singapore's economic footprint continue to expand well beyond its geographic one.

The goals that Singapore has set for itself in terms of economic diversification and expanding exports in areas such as professional services, urban development, biomedical devices and digital media will require that it become not just a smart city, but home to the world's smartest "city-zens".

All this hints at an equally important aspect of the info-state: real-time governance. As Singapore's democratic politics make day-to-day policies less predictable, this must not outweigh the equally important trend of harnessing data around zones of economic need and social tension, enabling rapid feedback loops to policymakers and swift responsesthat strengthen and empower society.

As Mr Eric Li, the exuberant Shanghai entrepreneur, emphasised in the opening panel, what will matter more in the 21st century is not whether a nation is democratic or not, but whether it is well governed or poorly governed.

As Singapore becomes ever more an Asian melting pot and a microcosm of the world's economic, demographic, technological and cultural trends, it will have to work even harder to set the standard for Asia and beyond.

The writer is director of the Hybrid Reality Institute and author of the new e-book Hybrid Reality: Thriving In The Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (TED Books, 2012).

Why we resist the ideologues

There are... liberal democracies where you can have an "Amos Yee" type freedom.

There are also very sad places where there is little freedom or security, and life is very hard.

And there are a few places where there is quite a lot of chaos and life is uncertain.

Then there are very few places where you can be reasonably civilised and have sufficient security and responsible freedom to have a good life.

Singapore is one such Oasis of sensibleness... we are an Oasis of order, competence, efficiency, and reasonableness in an otherwise chaotic unreasonable, incompetent WORLD. Not just the region.

If Singapore becomes a copy of a Western Liberal Democracy with all the inherent inefficiencies, silliness, drama, and chaos, it would be a very sad thing...

If Singapore breaks down and devolves into a corrupt, ineffective, unfocused, shambling chaotic third world country, it would also be a very sad thing.

There is only one place where you can find Singapore's straightforwardness, integrity, efficiency, competence, order... And that is here, in Singapore.

If we lose this, whether because we lean to much to the left, or whether we let ourselves sink into mediocrity through complacency or a sense of destiny, or divine right, it will be gone.

...so that is why we resist the ideologues.

Trees

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”

Reminder

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” - Ernest Hemingway

The Tao of Government

"Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthen their bones."

"He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge, and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal."